Would you care to elaborate?

Gears of War and Halo are different beasts altogether. As you said, they've always been rather samey, so you can't can't point to the fact as a downturn in standards because it never had a standard for changing things up in the first place. Mario, on the other hand, not so much. As you pointed out yourself (and as did I in my previous post), every main Mario game, from the original Super Mario Bros on the NES right up to Galaxy is radically different from the last. Each game does something almost drastically new, yet always does it extremely well. That's what made Mario such a fantastic and almost universally loved franchise. But we've not seen a Mario game that did something so new like that since Galaxy, and that was back in 2008. These New Super Mario Bros games most certainly are not. Not one of them is even close to the same standard of both innovation and excellent execution. Really now, it's been five years and not even an announcement of a possible worthy successor to Galaxy has been heard.

You honestly are going to say with a straight face that the series isn't stagnating?
I'll wholeheartedly admit, Zelda is still a good franchise. I enjoyed the hell of or Spirit Tracks (which, incidentally, was in fact the most recent top-down Zelda), and though I haven't played Skyward Sword, for what it's worth I hear that it's actually good despite the Wii-mote controls. That said, the new 3DS Zelda is called "Link to the Past 2", so the series could well go the way of Mario. It's certainly not a sure thing at this point, don't get me wrong, but it is a possibility all the same and honestly, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.

Don't forget that the second Zelda game was called Zelda II. By that I just mean you can't place much significance on the name LttP2 (which may also just be a placeholder name). Oh yes, and I'd certainly recommend Skyward Sword. There are some bad things about it, but the controls aren't one of them (unlike Twilight Princess's they're not tacked on and are really responsive).

If it's anything approaching Dreamcast or Genesis levels of awesome, yes please!

I know it's hardly a certainty that Zelda is stagnating, I was just saying that with the way Nintendo is going, it wouldn't surprise me if it did. I really hope it doesn't, because it's my favourite Nintendo series but if it did it would be rather par for the course for Nintendo.

LOL

I explained later that there is difference in making a game platform exclusive because it doesn't make sense to publish in on some other, dying platform because you'd only lose money there, or because one is just trying to push their own platform.

You can't realistically demand game publishers to release their games on all possible platforms, but you can demand them not to artificially restrict some games to only one platform even though the game would sell great on some other platform too, just because they don't want that other platform succeed. Even GOG released Witcher games on Steam (but then comparing free service accounts to HW units or Oses which cost money are apples to oranges anyway; having to install several clients and use several accounts for gaming is just an extra inconvenience, not an extra money hole).

Explained above. For the common end-user, one of the motives sounds justified, the other does not.

From the end-user point of view it is better that the HW and service providers compete by who offers the best HW unit or service that offers the best bang for the buck, without dirty practices like restricting the content appearing on competing platforms due to exclusivity deals. Only then it is easier for the end-user to say "no" if some platform or service tries to e.g. push their lackluster platform/service (e.g. with always-online DRM).

Real world example: DVD vs Circuit City DIVX. CC DIVX was supposed to be the replacement for DVD players, having embedded DRM system. Some big movie studios were the big backers of the system, and IIRC they were already in the mode that they wouldn't release their movies to DVD, but only CC DIVX.

So, they were trying to push an inferior replacement for DVD to homes, by restricting content only to DIVX CC, and not by making that competing platform _better_ for the end-customer than DVD. And you seem to be promoting such practices.

Now, if the movie studios would have simply released their movies on both DVD and DIVX CC, and then let the market decide which they want to embrace, that I would have found completely fine. If the consumers would have still opted for DIVX CC, then oh well, they get what they deserve.

And I am against such practices, if that didn't come clear already.

But still, it is not as bad as if you had to buy a separate Netflix TV or mediabox just to watch those series.

You have valid reasons to be against exclusivity deals, but how is it a dirty practice? Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony make their own games, they're free to release it in whatever platform they want. It's not a dirty practice, it's common business. Is Microsoft dirty for not releasing their games on Linux and Mac, their competitors? What you're proposing here is beyond logic. Why would a company make an expensive game for it's competitors? Why would anyone make products for it's competitors? Yeah, it sucks, but that's capitalism for you.

We can still say "no" to bad business practices. I've said it before and i'll say it again: if the next-Xbox does have always-online i'll not buy it. And i love the Halo franchise, i have every Halo ever released and i've finished every single one of them. It'll be a loss for me, but you know what? I can live without Halo, there are hundreds of games in the market, i don't have to play every single game ever released, i don't even have time for it. But i'm not buying a console with BS limitations.

Urgg i am not a bad person to wish bad to others, i did enjoy the NES and Super NES very much, i own a DS and DS XL, and a Wii with select games i enjoy but...

YES! I do want Nintendo to go bankrupt now.. Because the 3ds is having obnoxious success over the Vita, and because the Wii U is not worthy of NextGen brand, with the soon same old titles remade..

Sorry, Big N! As if my opinion have any weight over your sharky marketing anyways!

Standard APIs for many high-level languages are supported across Windows/Mac OS/Linux.

And the APIs that are OS-specific are a very small area of the code.

Games were mostly released for Windows, because Windows had an overwhelming market share (over 95%).

With Mac OS's share increasing, you see more and more games being released for Windows/Mac and also Linux.

Compared to that, the APIs for consoles were drastically more different when I worked with them.

The mobile market is converging toward a more streamlined development interface (many use the same OS and support web apps).

I'm not too worried about the future of the mobile market, but I'm pretty certain that 10-20 years from now, the console market will still be a fragmented mess.

PC manufacturers are consumer beneficial competition.

Console market would be consumer beneficial competition if you bought your console based on the hardware.

Instead, the console manufacturers slice the available games into console exclusive sub-sets.

You think that if it was a genuine consumer beneficial competition, people would buy several consoles that do the same thing just to play all the games they want to play?

Companies sell generic computers (PCs, Macs) at a profit and people buy them.

The mobile market is a bit less healthy (they push the phones through plans), but tablets are sold at a profit and people buy them.

Consoles can't be sold at a profit, because what they offer is inferior: a machine that only does a subset of what other machines (PCs, Macs, even tablets) can do and whose main selling point are the exclusive games they acquired.

"But <Insert console here> offers a cool peripheral!"

Yes and they could have made that peripheral for a more generic computing machine at a fraction of the price.

The core of what they are selling is still crap.

I actually have a bit more respect for the wii than for other consoles (and they actually sold the wiis at a profit which is the healthier model for an hardware manufacturer), because they innovated, but like I said above, they could have released what made the wii as a peripheral for a more generic computing machine.

Exactly. People go "why would I buy that crap when I could buy an actual computer for a comparable price?".

Yes, well, a lot of the messes we are in now is because people don't have a vision about the future.

The present is an infinitely small time slice that will soon be the past.

The future is an infinity of upcoming presents.

Worrying about the future pays off.

the main problem being that their digital shops are system bound, rather than account bound. Imagine for a second if gog said "okay any games you buy on gog you can only play on 1 computer. If that computer dies you lose all your downloads forever. If you have two computers on next to eachother you can transfer your whole account to the other computer, but you can only do this a total of 5 times, ever."
Thats what nintendo does.

Can't you transfer the account from a 3ds to a 3dsxl?

Also transferring Wii to WiiU stuffs IIRC. Not sure. Don't have a WiiU. Or a XL.

only if you have both systems in the same room and they are able to be turned on. And only a total of 5 times ever.
If your system gets stolen, you have to call up nintendo and beg for some store credit.

Yes, you can transfer, they're the same kit, just one has weaker speakers, a bigger screen and no excuse for having better resolution.
Thank you. I knew exactly what they did, I just wanted this to be presented for others to see.